This was published in India Today in January 1979. The text of the article in India Today :

Bright Ray

As a child, Satyajit Ray, the world famous filmmaker, never once thought that he would make films. He grew up in his ancestral mansion in Calcutta, drawing and painting. He would doodle the long summer afternoons away hoping that his attempted portraits and cartoons would appear in his family’s famous children’s magazine Sandesh. As a Brahmin, his family regarded the cinema and theater as frivolities.

His first boyhood wonder was his father’s printing press. He remembers having been lifted up to look through the ground-glass view finder of the tall halftone camera. He often visited Shantiniketan where he played with Rabindranath Tagore’s grand-daughter.

He has fond memories of the florist’s shop in New Market and stately horse-drawn carriages giving way to automobiles. As a child, all he wanted when he grew up was to be a painter.

Eleven years after she won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, 14 conversations (2001-2008 ) with Roy on her social and political activism appear in a new book The Shape of the Beast.

Even before The God of Small Things hit the world of fame,this female Rushdie of India attracted lot of media attention when she criticised Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi, charging Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning. For sometime Roy was involved as film script writer as well. She even tried her hands at acting in films. Not many remember but Arundhati Roy played a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib.

The Shape of the Beast finds Roy fulminating against the 2002 Godhra genocide, empathising with the adivasis of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh and venting against the military operations in Nagaland, Kashmir and Manipur.Through this book Roy has revealed both a personal and social journey.

William Dalrymple’s love for India is not unknown. He has penned six books, of which five have embraced Indian life as their storyline and have been award winning. India has sewn itself into his life since long now with him spending a lot of time in New Delhi India apart from London and Edinburgh.

However, since last couple of years Jaunapur (a small village on the outskirts of Delhi) has been home to the the author and his family. Delhi has been the backdrop for many of Dalrymple’s books including The Last Mughal, a prizewinning account of the Indian uprising of 1857, and the fall of the Mughal dynasty. The book has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide.

Kolkata is celebrating Jaya Bachchan’s latest in Bengali cinema Lovesongs -Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.However Bengali has been used sparsely in this movie; English being predominant language for the film. Based on the story by the Director itself, the film centers on 64-year-old Mridula Chatterjee (Jaya Bachchan) She is an independent, cheerful, fun-loving widow who runs an NGO for disabled people in Kolkata. The film is woven through Mridula’s unspooling her past which turns into a process of deep introspection and self-discovery, helping her to understand the choices she had to make.

Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five have undergone a radical 21st-century makeover for a new Disney cartoon series Famous Five: On The Case. The members of the new Famous Five are children of the original five created in 1942 – team leader Julian, Dick, George, Anne and the dog Timmy. They are Jo, Max, Allie and Dylan together with their pet dog, Timmy.

The kids share their parents’ love of adventure and mystery-solving. However unlike their parents they are iPod-wearing children who fight off their enemies using mobile phones and other modern-day gadgets, and uncover plots like a pirate DVD factory, whose owner, a phony environmentalist, has been embedding subliminal messages in the discs to brainwash children.

Salman Rushdie and Arunadhati Roy are competing with Yann Martel for The Best of the Booker. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is neck to neck in the race with The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Rushdie won in 1981 and Martel in 2002. The Life of Pi is a fable of survival after a shipwreck (2002) while Midnight’s Children challenges ideas of history and nationhood (1981).